James Cowling of Dropbox (architect of their distributed storage system), speaks to Robert Blumen about their move from Amazon’s S3 to their own infrastructure; The show covers: the size, scope and scale of Dropbox’s data management; their experience on Amazon’s S3; why S3 over time did not meet their needs; how the decision was made to build their own; the architecture of Magic Pocket; building the skill sets they needed but did not have at the time; are layer violations ever a good thing?; his team’s “zero errors” policy; the important of invariants; how devops (sre) made the move easier; how they migrated; a brief excursion into the hardware side; what can engineers learn from this migration that will apply to other migrations (even smaller ones)?